Global Abilities

Enhancing awareness and understanding for those with disabilities.

Community Partner

Established in 2011 by AJ Nanyakkara, the Global Abilities Foundation seeks to increase cultural understanding and provide resources to address significant challenges that persons with disabilities face.

CHALLENGE

Global Abilities reached out to Beautiful Social to learn how to reach a wider audience through social media platforms, grow their community, and spread the organization’s mission.

STRATEGIC THINKING

In order to learn more about this community, we attended Workout of the Day, a collaboration with our community partner and local CrossFit organizations to help persons with disabilities get access to recreation. At this event we captured video to raise awareness and understanding for those with disabilities. The media assets we produced will be used to promote future events which feature adaptive equipment for persons with disabilities.

At the event we were inspired by how every adapted athlete had more passion and determination than any other athlete we had ever met. Based on this experience we created a Twitter campaign for Global Abilities called #MotivationMonday to encourage a greater number of individuals with disabilities to become more physically and socially active. We then embarked on some general social media training with Global Abilities, focusing specifically on Facebook and Twitter.

RESULTS

The team team met frequently with Global Abilities to provide hands on social media training and insights into popular social media platforms. We assisted Global Abilities in crafting more engaging social media content and provided guidance on how to respond to Facebook users. Since working with Global Abilities Foundation’s social media platforms in March, we have documented more active participation and engaging conversations on Twitter, with a 27.5% increase in followers and an 8.5% increase in “likes ” on Facebook as well as a rise in post views.

We concluded this project by devising a social media campaign and creating a new social media internship position within the Global Abilities Foundation. Finally, we wrote an internship advertisement and discussed a strategy to post the position so that the intern can carry out the campaign and continue our work when the semester ends.